Steven LaChance Blog

To those reading this in 2025, I write with a heaviness in my heart and soul that feels both familiar and newly urgent. The past nine years have tested our collective resolve as an LGBTQ+ community in ways many of us feared but dared not fully imagine. With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, we’ve witnessed once again a calculated erosion of protections for queer and transgender Americans—a regression dressed in rhetoric about “tradition” or “religious liberty,” but rooted in nothing less than systemic erasure.

Let me speak plainly: this administration has weaponized policy against our humanity. The Trump White House’s attacks on LGBTQ+ rights have not been subtle. They’ve rolled back nondiscrimination safeguards for healthcare, housing, and employment—protections hard-won over decades. They’ve endorsed state-level bills targeting transgender youth, denying access to lifesaving medical care and barring them from sports teams and bathrooms. They’ve stacked federal courts with judges hostile to marriage equality and workplace fairness, ensuring that legal battles we thought settled will haunt us for years.

And yet, here we are—still paying taxes into a system that funds our own marginalization. Still expected to uphold civic duty while being told, in ways both explicit and insidious, that our lives are disposable. I cannot reconcile writing checks to a government that funnels resources into dismantling our rights, nor ignore the bitter irony of subsidizing our own oppression.

This is not hypothetical. In 2025, LGBTQ+ families live under renewed scrutiny, fearing audits or legal challenges to their parental rights. Queer youth face rising suicide rates as school programs affirming their identities are defunded or banned. Trans adults, already navigating systemic barriers, now fight to retain basic access to identification documents, healthcare, and public spaces. These are not “culture war” abstractions. They are human crises.

But let me be unequivocal: this administration does not define America. Nor does it define us. What they dismiss as “agendas” or “lifestyles” are, in truth, the beating heart of our community—our love, our families, our fight to exist without apology. History has shown us that progress is fragile, but it has also shown us that resilience is woven into the DNA of marginalized people. We are here because our ancestors refused to be erased. We will remain because we refuse it too.

To my LGBTQ+ community: This moment demands more than pride. It demands action. Volunteer with organizations challenging discriminatory laws. Support candidates at every level who prioritize equality. Document injustices. Protect one another. And above all, remember that you are not a statistic, a talking point, or a pawn. You are a force, fight.

To allies reading this: Silence is complicity. Stand with us in tangible ways—call your representatives, donate to mutual aid funds, vote as if lives depend on it (because they do). Equality cannot thrive in the absence of courage.

This administration wants us to believe we are powerless. But power has always resided in our collective voice, our visibility, and our refusal to surrender. They may try to drag us backward, but we are anchors—not of stagnation, but of steadfastness.

In solidarity,
Steven